It's a nice design (kind of reminds me of Homeworld). I'm sorry that my advice has not proven sufficiently helpful for you to get your model of it into the game.

I can think of very little to add to Mr. Vulkan's post, except that I don't think that anyone has yet mentioned the fact that all edited odfs have to be in the "addon" folder itself, and not the respective subfolders that the original odfs are organized into when downloaded (the "ships" folder, etc.).

1. Does a texture need to be .tga?
2. or what can it be else?
3. and a ship is supposed to be white if it has no texture? my game makes it transparrant.
4. were can i find the .odf files of the original ships in the game? because i can't find them.

but to you all, thank you so much. thanks to you i've a new ship in armada1. (transparrant so you can't see it (only the red and the green light)) but okay, the point is: thanks

1. Does a texture need to be .tga?
2. or what can it be else?
3. and a ship is supposed to be white if it has no texture? my game makes it transparrant.
4. were can i find the .odf files of the original ships in the game? because i can't find them.

but to you all, thank you so much. thanks to you i've a new ship in armada1. (transparrant so you can't see it (only the red and the green light)) but okay, the point is: thanks

Invisible, eh? I've had no shortage of this problem. I don't presume to know every possible cause for this, but when I was first making my own ships, I encountered this. In my own case, it was because of LODs. One must be sure that one's only h_lod in one's list of joints is the one that has the m_meshes underneath it. Every h_lod is, in the strictest terms, a level of detail. Only one lod will be displayed at any given distance of the camera from the object, and therefore having two out of three h_lods empty will mean that normally the ship won't show up. The easy way to see if this is a problem is to zoom in on your ship in the game. If it suddenly "pops" into visibility, then it's the lod's. If not, then I don't know. But if you have had non-tga textures, that, as you now know, has been causing problems, whatever those might be. The problem with problems is that there's usually more than one. Hope all (or at least some) of this helps. Also, if you don't have the means to export images in .tga format, I'd be happy to convert them for you (we'd just have to figure out some way to electronically exchange the textures, which I've never tried before.)

LOD is the game's way of keeping your computer from running extremely slow when you have dozens of high-memory ships in the same frame. When your view is far away from objects that you see, the ships in the game have lower levels of detail that they switch to. When viewed at close range, they switch to high-detail as the game presumes that you won't be able to see very many objects in the near foreground. We as modders, though, don't need to use different LOD's, however, the mesh nodes (meshes being, as Zman said, the actual model, and mesh nodes [the m_ ones in the joint list] being the hardpoint reference for the model) are children of one LOD (they'd show up on the joint list as h_lod0, h_lod1, and h_lod2) or the other. So if you have named the "group" that your ship is as: hull , then at one point in the joint list you'd need it to read like this:

h_lod0
m_hull

The easiest way to make sure that all is in order is to borrow the hardpoints of another model and rearrange only the light and weapon hardpoints. If you do that, the h_lod's will already be there, and with m_'s beneath them. Simply delete all h_lod's except one and rename the m_ to match the name you gave the group(s) that your ship is made of. If there is more than one group, but only one m_, all you have to do is select the m_ in Milkshape and use the Joint Tool and select New Joint Between Parent and Child Node (likely not exact wording; I'm not typing this from my modding computer) and then rename the resulting joint (joint1 it will be called) to whatever the name of the other group is preceded by the m_. This is how I do it, and when I do it right, it works every time. I'm not sure I could be any more specific if I tried, so I hope I've explained this adequately.